It was only a few years ago that we thought email marketing was on the verge of death, but that’s hardly the truth now. Emails have grown from that boring whitewash background with plain black text, to filled with colored text, styling, linked text, and images. The days of plain old emails are gone and the new age of emails are in. Most email tools allow you to add logic to personalize your emails for your contacts.
Email marketing has been a great powerful tool for marketers to reach their audience and send out product information and offers. With an ROI in the 4000% range, it is not surprising to hear that we have 76% more marketers using emails than 3 years ago.
The evolution of email marketing kicked off in 1978 when Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corp (DCE) sent a “mass” (if you could even call it that) email to nearly 400 potential customers using the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). His email resulted in an astonishing $13 million worth of sales and showed just how powerful email marketing could be. After Thuerk showed the world the power of email marketing, the number of business emails sent have been increasing. According to Entrepreneur, more than 193 billion emails are sent each day, and of those, nearly 109 billion are from businesses. That’s a lot of emails! With so many emails, we’re lucky to have plenty of available analytical devices at our disposal to keep track and analyze how our emails are affecting customers.
With so many emails being sent out daily, you are competing to be read by your customers and you’re competing with Google and other tools out there that send your emails straight to the spam folder. Mailchimp describes spam as unsolicited, irrelevant emails sent in bulk to a list of people. Spam is hated by all and loved by none. If anyone ever says they love spam, they’re lying. Because everyone hates spam, we have started to develop ways to combat spam through automated filters that are scanning emails contents for relevance and validity. When your content is flagged as spam, it gives you a spam score, which in the long run hurts your deliverability to customers. It’s recommended that you don’t buy lists of users and instead, generate your lists from opt-in opportunities. This makes sure that your emails are sent to not only those more interested in your products but users that are okay and happy to receive this information.
Emails are one of the best ways for us as marketers to keep our product in the minds of millions and send out that coupon that’ll entice a few thousand users to head out and buy our product. But in order to make sure that our emails are going to their inboxes, we have to make sure that we’re sending relevant and accurate information to lists of users that want our content. We have been doing this for a while now as that is the main strategy of inbound marketing (to send relevant information to a prospective customer at the right point in their buyer’s journey). The best way to do this is to let people opt-in to your emails. This way, they want your information and won’t just delete it without reading it.our list might be smaller than buying one, but your return will be greater because these are the customers ready to buy your product.
Emails are nowhere near ready to die, with 4.3 billion accounts and 190+ billion emails sent daily they are still growing. Emails have always been a great way to send your offer out, but nowadays it’s not as easy. With spam filters and people simply deleting your emails, it’s time to start looking at emails in a different way, a smarter way. Thinking smarter about your emails will increase your overall ROI and will help generate more qualified leads without hurting the reputation of your company.